2006 Los Angeles Auto Show - Part 1

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The U.S. carmakers show us how it's done in L.A.

By Justin Kaehler

For the past few years, Los Angeles and Detroit have been battling it out for the privilege of hosting the first "big" auto show of the year. In early '05, we heard some rumors that Los Angeles would reschedule its auto show so that it wouldn't conflict with Detroit's. After all, Los Angeles is an important auto market, and the L.A. organizers want to have some "big guns" at its show.

Well, it turns out that the L.A. show will be rescheduled in 2007, giving Detroit the honor of officially being the "first big auto show of the year". As the L.A. show keeps its early January show date in 2006, the L.A. Auto Show had fewer major debuts and concepts. That doesn't mean that the show was a total bust; we Californians did get to peek at some new cars before anyone else.

For the next few days, we'll be looking at some of the more important vehicles of the L.A. Auto Show. Being the patriotic types that we are (now that we're owned by Fox), we figured we'd start things off by looking at the U.S.-made vehicles that were on display at the show.

Before we go on: don't see your favorite American car here? Then be sure to check out our Media Page, we're sure to have a few pictures of it there!

General Motors Out of the Big 3 auto manufacturers, GM brought out the most new and exciting vehicles. Sure, we didn't have a Camaro concept to drool over, but we at least got to see the Saturn Sky in person.

More exciting than the Saturn Sky was the Pontiac Solstice GXP. Sure, it isn't as pretty as the Sky, but this hopped-up American roadster now packs a turbocharged inline 4 that packs a 260 horsepower punch. As many auto journalist-types called the "regular" Solstice the "Miata Fighter", perhaps this GXP will be known as the "Miata Killer"? Time will tell...